The Clinton Fusion Russian Collusion

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.” —George Washington (1796)

Again, in the spirit of the Watergate investigation, I ask, “What did WaPo know, and when did they know it?” Did it really take 10 months for some Beltway “journalist” to make the connection between Clinton, the DNC and the Russians?

Four days before the WaPo report, Clinton was still asserting the Trump Collusion Delusion: “The closer the investigation about real Russian ties between Trump associates and real Russians … the more they just want to throw mud on the wall, and I’m their favorite target.”

She might already be Mueller’s “favorite target.”

The most notable — and expected — indictment was delivered to Paul Manafort, the short-term manager of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. But as it turns out, Manafort did not collude with the Russians to undermine the 2016 election — but Clinton, her campaign chief John Podesta, his brother Tony, and the DNC did.

They did exactly what they have accused Trump of doing…

More on Manafort in a minute, but first, let’s review how we arrived at these indictments.

In October of 2015, a couple of notable establishment GOP “Never-Trumpers,” billionaire Paul Singer, who is closely associated with William Kristol, used the Washington Free Beacon to fund some domestic opposition research on Trump, in hopes of giving candidate Jeb Bush a leg up in the Republican presidential primary. Contracting for “oppo research” is a common campaign tactic, but not so common for a conservative media outlet during the GOP primary.

The Free Beacon obtained the services of Washington-based Fusion GPS, but dropped the project after their man Bush withdrew from the primary in February of 2016.

A month later, looking for somebody to keep the cash flowing, Fusion’s Glenn Simpson pitched the project to partners at Perkins Coie, the Clinton and DNC law firm. (These people know no loyalty.) In April, Perkins Coie hired Fusion to continue the black-bag operation, and law-firm partner Marc Elias was the bagman. In the coming months, hundreds of thousands of dollars were funneled from Clinton and the DNC to fund Fusion, which was increasingly under pressure to deliver something big.

In June, Fusion hired Christopher Steele, formerly head of the Russian desk with British Intelligence (MI6). Steele’s Russian contacts then fabricated a best-seller about Trump and Moscow prostitutes. Steele insisted that Vladimir Putin was blackmailing Trump, and thus, Trump was colluding with Russian operatives. (Great novel!)

Clinton campaign chairman Brian Fallon once declared, “There’s a difference between going out and hiring opposition research firms that work in the United States of America and going out and soliciting information from a foreign national.”

Indeed there is.

On 05 July, Steele gave his “election tampering narrative” to an FBI contact, who delivered it to FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok — without indicating that the dossier was paid for by Clinton and the DNC. What better way to hammer Trump than to use a fake dossier to put the FBI on his trail. Then Clinton campaign and DNC operatives started social media chatter to generate interest in the dossier claims.

The FBI then opened an investigation into alleged Trump/Putin collusion to influence the 2016 election outcome.

For the record, here’s a keen observation of the obvious: For almost a century, Russia and other statist regimes have endeavored to undermine our government and economy, as well as confidence in our elections by any method possible, most recently to include social media. With the help of the Clinton/DNC Fusion collusion delusion, and the resulting investigations, Putin has most certainly succeeded in the latter.

If this surprises you, then go back to sleep.

If you’re still awake, you have to ask yourself, which candidate would Putin have preferred to face after the 2016 election — Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, whose “Russian reset” paved the way for him to march into Ukraine, ensuring his oil and gas export capabilities?

If your answer is “Trump,” then zzzzzzzzz.

In August, the fake dossier becomes the subject of intense interest over at the CIA, and Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan takes it upon himself to brief then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Days later, Obama’s deep-state operatives within the FBI and DoJ obtained a FISA surveillance warrant citing the fake dossier as evidence.

Still no mention of who funded it, but if both the FBI and CIA did not know that Clinton and the DNC were behind this charade, we are all in big trouble. Conversely, if they did know who funded it, we are in more trouble!

In the meantime, at the direction of Fusion, still churning their accounts with Clinton and the DNC and in need of some big “fake news” ahead of the election, Steele “briefed” The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, The New Yorker and Yahoo! News, which published an article in September based on information in the fake dossier, but not mentioning it or its source. Otherwise, no takers.

In October, before the contract with Clinton and the DNC ended, the FBI offered to pay Steele in order to keep the investigation moving forward ahead of the election. In November, after Trump’s election, Steele sent a copy of the dossier to Trump’s adversary, Sen. John McCain, who then personally brought it to the attention of then-FBI Director James Comey.

In December, Steele added his final chapter to the dossier, alleging that the Russians hacked the DNC’s email system — but as you recall, the DNC would not turn over its servers to the FBI for review. Perhaps the experience with Clinton’s secret email servers gave them cold feet. (Hmmm)

In January of 2017, Comey briefed then-President-elect Trump on some elements of the dossier claims, a meeting that turned out to be a setup for an FBI leak to CNN. Then the leftist tabloid website BuzzFeed published the fake dossier using the CNN story as its justification.

In March, Michael Morell, Obama’s former CIA deputy director (and Clinton’s designated director had she been elected), offered this blunt assessment of the dossier: “There is smoke but there is no fire at all. There’s no little campfire. There’s no little candle. There’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it. … [The dossier] doesn’t take you anywhere.”

As for Steele and his crude methods, Morell noted how that undermined the dossier’s authenticity: “Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just can’t.”

In a previous assessment a year ago, Morell concluded that Trump was, at worst, an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

Of course, ahead of the election, Clinton and the DNC were not interested in the facts but only the information’s value as political propaganda to undermine Trump’s campaign — to influence the election outcome. Ironically, it is still being used to influence the election outcome by undermining his victory.

Morell continued: “Intermediaries paid the sources … and that worries me. [I]f you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, ‘Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,’ because they want to get paid some more. I think you’ve got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier.”

Of course, Steele wanted to get paid more just like Fusion wanted to get paid more — and the only way to do that was to come up with dirt to help Clinton and the DNC sucker-punch Trump.

But by that time, the fake dossier had become the centerpiece of the FBI investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia to win the election. House Intelligence Committee minority ranking member Adam Schiff (D-CA) declared that if there was collusion, “It would not only be a serious crime, it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of democracy in history.”

Well of course he did — but that’s irrelevant now. Robert Mueller is on the case. As for his “mandate,” Mueller is free to go wherever he thinks a criminal trail is leading him. Recall that the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton for perjury in connection with having “relations” with female subordinates in the White House began with Special Counsel Ken Star’s investigation of the Clinton corruption originating with the Whitewater scandal in Arkansas years earlier. (Predictably, the Demo-controlled Senate did not convict Clinton, though he did have to surrender his law license.)

Bottom line: We now know there was direct collusion with the Russians with the intent of influencing the 2016 election — but it was Clinton and the DNC doing the colluding…

After WaPo finally exposed those details last week, former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is contending with her own considerable corruption problems, claimed, “I wasn’t aware of the arrangement at all.”

As for the new and improved DNC, it released this statement: “Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization.”

Perez claimed, “I don’t know how much of the opposition research was Fusion opposition research. I have not desegregated that amount.”

Right.

A week later, Perez is still stonewalling questions about DNC payments to Fusion, insisting, “Opposition research is not simply something that ought be done, it would be malpractice not to do it.” But of course he made no mention of the fact Democrats were colluding with Russians to influence the 2016 election.

Attempting to pivot back to Trump, Perez added, “We know that we were hacked by the Russians at the DNC,” and, “What we know from the research is the Trump campaign and the Russians were talking to each other.”

Well, we certainly now know that the DNC would not let the FBI review those hacked servers and that Clinton, the DNC and Russians “were talking to each other” through their Fusion cutouts, and much more…

Now, full circle back to the indictment of Paul Manafort, who Mueller will likely “encourage” to say a few words about somebody else in order to lighten the charges against him.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote of the initial indictments, “After all these months of investigation, the much-anticipated Manafort charges turned out to be unrelated to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, let alone to any purported Trump-campaign collusion therein.”

Notably, Manafort’s indictment makes no mention of Donald Trump or his campaign, but recall that then-FBI Director James Comey repeatedly insisted that Trump was not a target of the investigation — before Trump fired him.

But what’s most interesting about Manafort is his connection with Tony Podesta and, by extension, his brother and Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The charges against Manafort are connected to the “work” he did for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych back in 2013-14 — using Tony Podesta as a primary lobbyist for Yanukovych.

On news of Manafort’s indictment, Tony Podesta has resigned from his firm, perhaps in anticipation of his likely indictment — one of at least four more indictments in the Mueller pipeline. And the Swamp is a cesspool of lobbyist graft, so more may follow.

On Manafort’s indictment, Senate Judiciary member Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) insisted, “There is no real allegation in this indictment about the Clinton campaign. … These allegations involve potential collusion with the Russians, wholly independent of anybody in the Clinton campaign.”

Right. Not yet.

Has anybody seen Hillary Clinton lately? If you run into her, please tell her, “Be careful what you wish for…” Ask her how she feels about a special prosecutor, mandated with investigating seven key questions about her Uranium One “deal” with Putin — now that was good old-fashioned corrupt Clinton collusion.

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